II
For many people, the thought of having to learn statistics is intimidating, so much so that someone once joked that it should have been called ‘‘sadistics.’’ If you struggled through a course in statistics and now fear that you have forgotten half of what you learned, the following two chapters provide some good news and bad news: The bad news is that over 95 percent of today’s social science research reports utilize statistical concepts of one sort or another. Therefore, those who want to read research reports and certainly those who want to conduct research in the field of criminal justice or any other social science cannot escape using statistical concepts.
The good news is that most of the principles behind statistics are not difficult to understand, especially in terms of how they are incorporated into research designs. The main difficulties in learning statistics come when people try to apply formulas and perform repeated manual calculations. These issues, however, are not dealt with in this book.
Some related good news is that it has become increasingly easy to perform complex statistical operations on data without detailed knowledge of the underlying statistics. This is possible because of several powerful computer programs now available that can carry out both simple and very elaborate statistical manipulations of data. This potential, of course, also has a downside because computers can be made to perform all sorts of inappropriate operations on data. Even seasoned researchers can sometimes mistakenly instruct a computer to analyze data in very inappropriate ways.
Think about statistics as being like driving a car to a destination instead of walking. People can be very good drivers without knowing how the engine or the transmission works. But one still needs to know the rules of the road, and should always be aware that some serious damage can result from driving where a motor vehicle was never intended to go.
The next two chapters take readers through many important elements of how statistics are used in social science research. These chapters focus on the practical aspects of how statistical concepts are tightly interwoven with most scientific research and can be read even by those who have not yet taken a course in statistics.